


Stitches and Seams

by damaraine



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-28
Updated: 2012-11-28
Packaged: 2017-11-19 19:13:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damaraine/pseuds/damaraine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which a professor of loveology and a mime with a guilty conscience find themselves not only in a flushed quadrant, but also in kind of a mess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stitches and Seams

Meulin did not hear the end of the scream. It had come in a tidal wave, tearing its way up his vocal chords and up into his mouth. Awful and ruptured and raw, sometimes she was quite glad that she had not heard all of it.

That moment, her hearing blinked out of her ears like the light of the sky when the sun came up. It was not as if she did not hear anything at all from that moment on, she still heard white noise. Bits and pieces. It was like being held under water, and gosh, that just didn't sit well with her and her cat thing.

Kurloz stirred and jolted awake. He saw her clutching her ears and screaming. She stopped screaming and started saying things, anything she could think off, but to no avail. The movements felt familiar in her mouth but they were not reciprocated in her ears. Nothing did anything to disturb the silence building in her ears.

His hands went up to his throat. He considered it the criminal in this equation. He wanted to tear the offending object out of its socket. But not even sweeps of pawing at it with his highblood hands could achieve that. So he placed those hands on Meulin's shoulders, which had refused to sag down in sobs and where still taut, screaming up a storm.

He shrunk down to her level, keeping a grip on her shoulders. He could feel his nails sink into her shoulders, but she didn't seem to notice. Her entire body was plastered with scratch marks from her particularly vivacious feline mentor, and he didn't think that a couple more would be such a tragedy at that very moment.

He told her that it would be okay. He nestled his head in her hair, all soft and tangled, but it did not quell her screaming, not one bit.

~

It took several days for Kurloz to convince Meulin's lusus that he was not, in fact, a life sized ball of yarn (and if he was, that green blooded Porrim would've likely made good use of him several years prior), and nor was he going to do commit any further harm unto her charge.

Meulin herself was curled up under a pile of skins, the fruits of several months’ worth of hunting. She was awake, and she was, most surprisingly, happy to see him. That made him happy. She wasn’t going to give up. She might have pounced on him had she been in higher spirits. But she didn't; she didn't even hear him announce his presence. That stomped the good spirits right out of him.

She could see him opening and closing his mouth, but anything of merit was lost to her ears. That was kind of what happened when you were deaf, she'd found. He sure was talkative today, she thought, a little bit winded by the words that she couldn't hear. Usually, she was the one who nattered on incessantly, and he would only interject to say something that was occasionally very profound, more often than not something quite bizarre enough to alarm, but mostly rather sleazy. And then they’d fall to the ground in peals of laughter, because his poor, wicked messiah’s ears were probably bleeding because of the awful statement. And then she’d laugh some more, because that in itself was ridiculous. She wondered whether non-verbal jokes were just as funny as the ones they’d told before …

"Kurloz," she said, knocking herself out of her reverie and paused, measuring out her words very carefully. "I can't HEAR YOU!" she finished, knowing her words came out far too loud, her caution for naught.

He looked crestfallen. She was not sure why, surely he had pegged that her hearing was long gone by now.

She hugged him, long and hard and thought about going for a catnap, but then felt her stomach curdle at the thought and decided that she ought to hold off on that one.

He left looking at the ground.

~

The next time she saw him, his mouth was crudely stitched together in some semblance of a smile. Wobbly and totally at odds with his eyes, which were intent on boring into the ground itself. He placed a book on the side board, letting any diffident questions just float while he flipped through it.

She tore him away from his scriptures and demanded to know what was wrong, why he was here, why he'd taken up embroidery and why he'd thought this mouth, of all places, was the correct place to start. She didn't care that her words probably came out all misshapen and the boundaries between letters were probably blurry, he was seriously starting to creep her out.

He made a bunch of very abstract gestures - slapping his hands over his ears and shaking his head, making his knees buckle up and down, up and down. For someone so entrenched in clown culture, he was a pretty shitty mime.

His mouth was beginning to tug and graze against its stitches. He clearly hadn't thought too hard about facial expressions contrary to smiling. Or eating. Or drinking. Meulin started to panic. She was deaf, and now he was mute and almost totally incapacitated. They were, to put it in the lightest terms, a bit of a mess.

Meulin bit her lip and stared at her fingers. She'd been trying to grow her nails out to look more like claws, but she kept nearly shelling her eyes out of her sockets whenever she tried to move her hair out of her eyes. She started to bite them, in hopes of stimulating some kind of solution. The solution, or at least something charading as a solution arrived at some thought, but it wasn't all that great. She'd written stories with similar morals that she would have willingly burned at any given opportunity.

She'd just have to work through it. Like she did her matchmaking. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, just far enough away from her eyes to ignore, it felt kind of perverse to compare this train wreck to whatever intangible meddling she'd done in her friend's love lives.  But she resented that, and knew that despite being only a slither on an intellectual ("a professor of LOVEOLOGY! a scholar of quadrants!" she would yell shrilly, and then have any couples whose conspiration she was in any way part of attest), result was what mattered, and that the means of getting it were irrelevant if it worked.

So she rummaged around for a bit until she found the book that Kurloz had brought, laying sadly neglected after the equally miserable kerfuffle that had followed. It was titled something along the lines of Beforan Sign Language (brilliant! why had she not thought of that?). She had trouble reading it because of the overly flowery font that it was written in. that was kind of how it was in Beforus - trying to make things seem peachier than they were.

She placed the volume in the space between them, and sat down. They spent the whole day crouched over that book, and by the time the sun began to stretch itself out on the horizon they had only learned how to sign was _I'm sorry._

**Author's Note:**

> a drabble sort of thing that I wrote almost IMMEDIATELY after the flash came out, which probably accounts for the butchered continuity and OVER THE TOP EMOTION.


End file.
